


I'll be back another day

by Catherines_Collections



Category: White Collar
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Betrayal, Dark Neal Caffrey, Gen, Psychopathology & Sociopathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-21
Updated: 2017-02-21
Packaged: 2018-09-25 23:11:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9851075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catherines_Collections/pseuds/Catherines_Collections
Summary: There are three people who know Neal Caffrey is a lie.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I watched season 1, read @tigriswolf's fics, had an idea, and here we are. I own nothing, please enjoy:)!

Mozzie looks at him, smiles and says, “Once a thief always a thief.”

And Neal just smiles back.

.

Neal Caffrey is a lie. A pretty package founded on charm and wit, built to disguise the hunger and chaos underneath.

Neal Caffrey came out of a hat one night after a well played out con when he’d had a little to drink – not enough to impair his senses. No, he’s no fool, he knows better than that – and nothing yet to lose. Neal Caffrey came from a hat and stuck around longer than expected: longer than needed.

(When they found him and tossed him in jail he spent a good portion of his time thinking where he could have ditched the identity, thrown Neal Caffrey to the curb and built himself back up from the bottom. 

But after he breaks out and ends up back in again, it's Peter Burke who sits across from him and says, “We may have a new deal for you.” 

He hides his excitement in his smile and leans in a little closer, “I’m listening.”)

(Neal Caffrey lives a little longer.)

.

He had a plan of course, to escape and leave and burn Neal Caffrey into the ground. Perfectly organized and thought out: flawless, really. But then Peter arrives for the first time in three years, all earnest words and pitying eyes. 

And well, Neal realizes just how fun this could be.

After all, their game of cat and mouse never really ended.

.

There are three people who know Neal Caffrey is a lie.

One of them is dead, two alive, and all three unaware of where Neal ends and he begins.

He sits at the table in his apartment and moves a piece on the chessboard, clicking his tongue.

It's a fun game to play.

(Some days he wants to say Neal begins with the tailored suits and stolen art, and ends when his fingers brush the trigger of a gun. He wants to say that Neal’s the pretty smiles and charming words and he's the venom and deceit buried between them. 

Of course he doesn't. He buries everything instead and gives Neal Caffrey a smudged slate instead of his shattered one.)

Peter gets close once, nearly uncovers the true him, and Neal waits in patient awe that Peter doesn't understand. He pulls up every identity Neal’s ever assumed, and Neal doesn't even know how he found a few of them, and narrows it down to two.

He picks the wrong one.

(He doesn’t understand why Neal’s jokes have so much bite that week.)

Mozzie knows, underground connections can help you with that he supposes, but of course he’s smart enough to never say anything. However, the lingering glances he receives on the rare occasion he's in possession of a gun are answer enough.

.

Kate knew. Not as much as everyone thought she did, not enough to get under his skin, or to make him realize he’d rather have her with him than against him like Peter and Mozzie.

No, Kate knew just enough – piercing blue eyes that could always catch him in a lie and the small grin that pulled on her lips when she would let him get away with it – and she used it to her advantage.

.

Peter spends a lot of their time together bragging, and maybe it would be endearing if he weren’t so wrong.

Usually it happens when Neal’s giving advice on a con or running through the steps he took himself on a job. Barely enough tenor in his voice to constitute as bragging or pride, but still Peter never fails to turn to him smirking, intending to crush and remind, and say, “I caught you.”

And Neal doesn’t say: I let you catch me; I let you think you backed me into a corner I couldn’t crawl out of, that I rely on you for everything, that your second chance grace program works. I let you catch me because our game is still running, it’s your turn on the chessboard, and I’m just waiting for the day I can claim your king.

Neal does say, charming smile falling in place, “Well maybe I’ll just have to be better next time.”

And he lets his grin grow teeth when Peter turns, shakes his head and laughs.

.

Kate saw through parts of him, though never enough to be concerning. She only saw through the first layer even though often time she thought she was seeing the third or fourth.

(She gave herself too much credit.)

One night she’d held his face in her hands, her warm breath against his lips refreshing and familiar and exhilarating, both of them breathless from their near brief encounter with death, and he let a finger brush across her cheek. Her grin grew and the spark brightened in her eyes, “You love it Neal,” she said, pink cheeked and frozen hands, lips chapped from the cold, “the danger, the thrill, the almost. I can see it, don’t bother trying to deny it.”

He had retracted his finger and threw his head back laughing, high on the adrenaline from escaping death and the bright success of a con, and she followed suit.

They took a train to Paris the next day.

.

The department’s divided on him. One half likes but doesn’t trust him, and the other half thinks he should still be rotting in a cell somewhere.

“Don’t mind them,” Jones says, after they walk by a group of agents who immediately begin checking their pockets and patting down their jackets after he walks by, “not everyone seems to believe in rehabilitation, but you’ll prove them wrong.” 

He says it with confidence, like he has no doubt that’s exactly what Neal will do.

Neal smiles at him, charming and thankful, and thinks of what Jones’ face will look like when he finds out the second half was right.

.

Kate didn’t push for answers, didn’t pry and attempt to manipulate him into revealing pieces of himself to her.

(Whether she actually cared enough about him to respect his privacy, or had enough self-preservation to realize how well he could cover things up, he’ll never know.)

They would stay up late, buzzed from booze and mocking more than half the art they had stolen. 

And usually the night would end with her, blue eyes too sharp for their tipsy haze, gaze hungry – glutinous really, oh so glutinous, and she said he was just as bad as her but no she was worse; she always looked as if she was starved, craving something that she wasn’t sure how to satisfy – and smile wide when she would lean into his shoulder and breath the words onto his cheek, “So Caffrey, what's next?”

.

Peter’s gone but Elizabeth’s home and she invites him in to sit and wait.

“He’ll be home any minute,” she says, making him tea while they wait. When she comes out she sets his tea on the table and sits on the couch directly across from his chair.

“When you go,” she says as she picks up her own tea, a forced calmness about her that fails to mask the steel in her voice, “make it quick and painless, you owe him that at least.”

He laughs at her comment and shakes his head, but his eyes sharpen slightly. “Elizabeth, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“No,” she comments, “I suppose you wouldn’t.”

They’re staring at each other in cold detached silence when Peter stumbles through the door, offers Elizabeth a quick kiss before leaving again, and yells for Neal to follow.

“It was nice to see you again, Elizabeth.” Neal offers, slipping his coat back on and smoothing out the wrinkles.

“You too, Neal.” She says and her eyes don’t leave him until he’s out the door.

.

Mozzie says, “So what's new?” And Neal tosses him a card. Mozzie doesn’t look up, just raises an eyebrow.

Neal leans back in his chair and stretches out like a cat. “I think it’s time Neal Caffrey disappeared.”

Mozzie doesn’t say poor Mr. and Mrs. Suit or Ah, a suitable revenge I would think or Are you sure you still want this? Second chances are hard to come by these days.

Instead he tucks the card into his pocket and nods, “I’ll take care of it.”

Neal smiles. 

.

Peter says, “I caught you, Neal.”

Kate says, “You love it Neal, the danger, the thrill, the almost. I can see it, don’t deny it.”

Mozzie says, “Once a thief always a thief.”

Neal moves another piece across the chessboard and smiles. 

.

He expects it when she goes. When she leaves their empty wine bottle and cleans out all of her stuff, careful not to leave a trace.

“Neal Caffrey won’t last forever,” she says to him on the other side of the glass, a prison phone in her hand, and her eyes a little less ravenous like she’s found a way to sedate her hunger, “and I think I’d rather end this while he’s still here.”

She leaves him then, and because he’s still Neal Caffrey – half mad from heartbreak and still starving for something he has yet to find – he places his hand on the glass in an attempt to feel some of the leftover heat.

.

When he leaves it's quieter than anyone expected. 

There's a card on Peter’s desk when he gets in, and the dread sets in his stomach before he even sees the familiar handwriting. He picks up the thin white parchment and reads:

Your move, Peter :).

His trembling fingers skate over a key taped to the back. 

The three words are all it takes to have Peter yelling for Diana to bring up Neal’s tracking data, and both of them scramble to set the machine up. 

Before they even see the data they both know it's pointless. 

.

This is what he leaves behind:

A silver tracking anklet with the batteries fried out and memory erased. 

A solemn June and an empty apartment that smells of newly opened wine and old paint. 

A distraught but clever federal agent and his caring and wise wife. 

The alias Neal Caffrey and every crime he ever committed while wearing it. 

.

Mozz looks at him, stretched out in his seat, eyes vigilant, pockets filled with cash, and asks, “So what now?”

And Neal - now Noah or Mark or John or Steve or anyone he wants to be - smiles and says, “Oh, I have some ideas.”

(Mozzie did say once a thief always a thief and well, Neal thinks smirking, he wasn't wrong.)

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Comments and kudos are much appreciated and I'm rhymesofblue on tumblr.


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